Protectiveness was a welcome feeling, anger even more so, but it didn’t distract from my discomfiture in this house. An hour ago it had been home. Now it was a goddamn evidence storage facility. What secrets did he hide here? Besides me and Bailey, that was.
I had to get out of here. I packed a still-sleeping Bailey into her car seat and drove to the grocery store. I’d put this trip off for a couple of days now, making meals that taxed my creativity with whatever I’d found in the pantry because I had eighteen dollars in my bank account. The credit card Colin had given me only two days after I moved in, all officially printed with my name, had rested unused in my purse. This day had loomed, of course, ever since I’d traded in my apartment and my job for this security. The day when I’d surrendered Bailey and myself completely to Colin’s care. Now it was here, when that very security was suspect.
Bailey woke up on the way and fussed. I sang to her from the limited selection of nursery rhymes I knew. She, thank goodness, turned a deaf ear to the tinny waver of my voice today and settled down.
At the store I distracted myself with price comparisons and Bailey with produce. Bell peppers in particular made excellent toy doubles with their stoplight colors, hardy shape, and ability to go into a stir-fry at the end.
We’d made it through the pantry aisles and were just approaching the dairy section when I heard my name in a hiss. Startled, I glanced behind a display of chocolate syrup to see Rick.
Christ, he’d scared me, huddled behind there like some sort of mugger of perishables. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
He glanced behind him, toward the meat counter, and then back at me. “Come here.”
“What? Why?”
“Just…come back here. I need to talk to you.” Then he turned and went down a fluorescent-lighted hallway.
Goddammit. Rick always brought the weird. But he was my friend, of a sort, and I couldn’t just continue shopping as if I hadn’t heard him. I backed up my cart and then pushed it after him. I caught sight of his boot just as some maroon loading doors swung shut. We shouldn’t be back here. And I had Bailey with me. I paused.
Rick poked his head out. “Come on.”
“All right, all right,” I grumbled. This had better be good.
Chapter Six
I pushed the cart through the doors into a large, shadowed room. Stacks of crates sprouted haphazardly from the cold, concrete floor.
The atmosphere of the room demanded I whisper. “What is it?”
“She’s so big,” Rick said, looking at Bailey.
Well, yeah. It’d been about a year since he’d last seen her, and then only for a brief hello one time when Shelly’d gotten an “emergency” call from a client and had dropped Bailey off at the bakery on her way. Which served to point out that the word “friends” was a bit of an exaggeration for the boss-employee relationship we’d had.
I cleared my throat and spoke normally. “We needed privacy for that?”
“Ah, no. It’s about your new guy.”
“Colin?” Damn. I had to stop volunteering information, especially with the cops nosing around.
“Yeah, Colin Murphy.”
I narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t even sure I’d said Colin’s first name when I told Rick about him, but I definitely wouldn’t have said his last. It hadn’t been a secret at the time, but it wasn’t Rick’s business.
“What about him?” I asked.
“I don’t know how much you know about him, but he runs some dirty shit. Anyway, he…” Rick trailed off.
“Spit it out,” I said.
“Well, I had some debts. You know, gambling, shit like that. Just around town, but he bought them up. Then he said I had to pay up.”
I glanced at Bailey, who’d managed to pull the stem off a red pepper, the use of swear words around her registering distantly in my mind. “Okay…did you want me to talk to him about it? Because I don’t really know if—”
“No, not like that,” he said. “He didn’t want the money.”
He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t get it. “But you just said…”
“He wanted the bakery shut down,” Rick said. “He wanted you out of a job.”
More crazy. Shouldn’t be surprised. “Why would Colin want me to be out of a job?”
He shook his head. “I’m not explaining this well. He wanted you out of a job so that you’d be dependent on him. For money. And since I was in a shitty situation, he could just make it go away. He knew I couldn’t pay up, but he didn’t care.”
“Wait. Colin came and said all this to you.”
“No, no. It was just one of their players. One of his brother’s guys.”
Yeah, Philip. It seemed as if everything circled back to him, and not in a good way. “But if it wasn’t Colin, then it could have just been…”
“He said I had to leave town,” Rick said. “And I wasn’t allowed to tell you why or give you anything or talk to you after that.”
I raised my eyebrows. Of course the thing I’d latched on to would be the useless piece of information, that he wasn’t exactly following the rules if he was talking to me now, was he?